


Aisle Number Eight

by Shachaai, shadow_of_egypt (Shachaai)



Category: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Genre: AU - Modern, M/M, Silly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-22
Updated: 2009-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-17 17:31:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/179281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shachaai/pseuds/Shachaai, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shachaai/pseuds/shadow_of_egypt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU. Kurogane meets the bane of his life in his not-quite-local supermarket.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aisle Number Eight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [batzypan](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=batzypan).



Kurogane had never been a great believer in destiny and fate; he didn’t really care all that much for them, never mind how his batty landlady and her two impossible cats harangued him about it. Ideas like _that_ were best left for dreamers and people with time to waste – Kurogane was Kurogane, and he had better things to do than stand around and contemplate the possible many meanings in life.

Sadly (or perhaps very luckily, depending upon one’s opinion of the matter), those ‘better things to do’ often took Kurogane into some form of mental dire straits or other: Kurogane may not have had much time for the heavens, but the celestial bodies _certainly_ made sure they set aside a regular amount of time for making sure their favourite chewtoy was thoroughly and ritually subjected to some kind of wonderful grievance. That day’s schedule consisted of blond hair, blue eyes, and sinfully long legs dashing down a row of dead bound-up octopi in the supermarket. 

The collision was swift, startling, and enough to send Kurogane back three steps, arms full of the _thing,_ straight into an uncomfortably cold seat on the edge of the open freezer along the wall. Shock – both at being so suddenly ran into and having his behind planted firmly among the fish fingers – blanked Kurogane’s mind for a few seconds, before he very quickly _shoved_ at the thing sprawled across his lap, sending it onto the supermarket floor, and hastily removing himself from the freezer because _hell,_ that thing was _cold._

There was a groan from the floor. “Ow…”

“What do you _mean,_ ‘ow’?!” Kurogane wasn’t in the mood to be especially forgiving, roughly trying to pat himself down of ice crystals so they wouldn’t melt on his butt and leave a wet patch for when he walked home. “ _You_ ran into me!” The idiot on the floor had nothing to gripe about – it had been _Kurogane_ who’d acted as a cushion in the collision, and _Kurogane_ who’d ended up sitting amongst the frozen produce. He looked down, annoyed, and caught sight of blond hair, a skinny frame picking itself up from the ground. Some foreign idiot – _wonderful._

“My apologies,” the stranger had an accent in their soft voice – Kurogane puzzled over the gender for a second before flicking his gaze down the other once. The stranger’s jumper was clinging and the chest seemed noticeably flat – he was male, then. “But did you really have to shove me onto the floor?”

“You were sitting on my lap.” Kurogane’s voice was flat.

A teasing lilt, “With that sort of reaction I guess Mr. Black doesn’t pick up dates very often then, huh?”

“I – _what does that have to do with anything?!”_ A few of the shoppers around jumped at the sound of Kurogane’s yell, before hastily scurrying back to their own business when the man glared at them.

“I’m Fai,” the stranger extended a hand, all smiles. Kurogane ignored it. “Fai D. Fluorite.”

“I’m busy.” Kurogane made to stalk past the twit – but paused when a hand caught at his arm. He looked back over his shoulder, meeting a far too-bright gaze, and snarled. _“What?”_

“That wasn’t very polite.” ‘Fai’ chided him. “When someone introduces themselves, Mr. Black, it’s customary to introduce yourself back. Let’s try again, hm? I’m Fai D. Fluorite; it’s nice to meet you.” 

“My name isn’t ‘ _Mr. Black’.”_

Fai sighed at him. “That’s a start, but it still needs a little polishing. Once more, then. I’m -”

 _"Kurogane.”_ Kurogane yanked his arm out of the idiot’s grasp, wondering just what it was he’d done to be landed with perpetual stupidity.

“…I beg your pardon?” The idiot tilted his head, questioning, and Kurogane hated how he noted the way that blond hair slithered to the side, a shimmering mess.

“My _name,”_ Kurogane growled, wondering just why he was humouring this _Fai,_ “is Kurogane.”

There was a delicate pause.

“ _Well,”_ Fai said consideringly, “ _that’s_ not very cute, is it?”

“It’s not _supposed_ to be ‘ _cute’_!!”

“Do you like ‘Kuro-chan’?” Fai ignored his companion. “Or ‘Kuro-pon’? Kuro-chan’s just got that sort of _air_ about it, but Kuro-pon rolls off the tongue much more easily -”

 _“Idiot,_ my name is _Kurogane.”_ Kurogane’s hands tightened into fists at his side – if he loosened them in any way he knew he was going to wrap them around this fluffy-brained stranger’s neck and _throttle_ him.

“Kuro-rin?” Fai continued on, oblivious, finger tapping his chin in thought. “But then there’s Kuro-pyu and Kuro-chii and Kuro-mu and Kuro-tan -”

Oh _hell_ no.

 _“IT’S KUROGANE!”_

“Kuro-chuu,” Fai said chidingly into the quiet that followed the taller man’s exclamation, tugging the other into a nearby corner away from the baleful eyes of the other shoppers. Stunned at the blond’s audacity, Kurogane unthinkingly went. “You shouldn’t yell like that in public. It’s very inconsiderate.”

 _Kurogane_ was inconsiderate?!

“Listen _here,_ idiot,” Fai clasped his hands together and looked up at Kurogane with the attention of a rapt student, and if the sparkly thing he was doing made him look stupidly pretty Kurogane was _not_ noticing it, forcing his words out through gritted teeth with what he thought was admirable calm. “My name is Ku-ro- _ga-ne._ Kurogane. Not _Kuro-rin,_ not _Kuro-pyu,_ and most _certainly_ not _Kuro-tan.”_

There was another pause.

“Kuro-mii,” said Fai simply, “I think I’m in love.”

 _“What?!”_ Kurogane’s voice echoed throughout the supermarket, about an octave higher than it should’ve been. A baby near the tills woke up at the sound, and began to cry. “Like _hell_ you are – we just met!!”

“That’s why it’s called love at first sight, Kuro-pii!” Sparkle, sparkle, _sparkle._ Some village – no, some _country –_ was missing its idiot. “Clearly, this is destiny at work, uniting two chosen souls in the fish-food aisle of their local supermarket -”

“This isn’t my local supermarket.”

“ _Exactly_ why this is destiny!” Fai wagged a finger in his face; Kurogane was tempted to grab it and test whether idiocy could persist under finger-bending torture. “Could we have met on any other day but today?”

“I was here last Tuesday.”

Fai looked at him blankly. “…Why?”

“My landlady wanted a specific kind of toilet roll.”

“…You buy toilet roll for your landlady?”

“…Once you’ve met the witch, you’ll learn buying her anything she asks for is worth it as long as she shuts up.”

“I’d _love_ to meet her!” Fai all but sparkled. Again. “Will you be at home Thursday evening? I can do Thursday.”

 _“That wasn’t an invite!!”_

 “Of course, I’ll need your address -”

 _“No._ Do you hear me? _No,_ no way in _hell -”_

“Thursday’s a bad day? Oh well,” Fai moved closer, and looped his arm through Kurogane’s, clinging to it even as the other began to immediately try and detach him, “you’ll just have to take me out for a drink now, then.” Kurogane tried to protest, he really did. “It’s the _least_ you could do after dumping me on the floor.”

“You pushed me into a freezer!”

“It doesn’t seem to have had any effect on Kuro-tama then.” Fai was somehow related to a limpet, Kurogane was _positive_ of it. All the prying he was doing at his arm couldn’t get the idiot to budge an inch. “He seems just as hot-tempered as when he first stalked in here.”

“…You were _watching_ me?” So the collision hadn’t been –

Blue eyes slid evasively away and Kurogane was about to comment on it, but suddenly there was something cold and hard shoved into his free hand - a bottle of milk – and Fai was smiling again.

“Kuro-rinta will help me with my shopping, won’t he?”

“Do I _look_ like somebody’s housewife?!”

Fai smirked and tucked a strand of his hair behind his ear – Kurogane’s stomach plummeted to somewhere about ankle-height. “ _I_ wasn’t the one shopping for toilet roll for my landlady, Kuro-kun.”

Kurogane chose to reply to that with a choice set of expletives that made some passing old ladies tut, a few reproving mothers cover their wide-eyed children’s ears, and a bunch of teenagers look at Kurogane with a whole new level of respect. He didn’t, however, drop the milk he’d been given, or even try and shove it back into Fai’s grasp. 

“…Kuro-myu,” Fai said thoughtfully after Kurogane’s tirade had finally come to an end, the taller male slightly out of breath, “I don’t think those last three suggestions of yours were even anatomically possible.” 

“You -” 

“ _Muffins!”_ Fai finally let go of Kurogane’s arm, dashing away to a nearby shelf that had caught his attention, plucking up a packet of sweet-smelling sugary goodness – blueberry muffins, as the packet proclaimed them – and returning to hand them to Kurogane to carry, pulling at the other man again to get him to follow Fai down the next aisle. “Do you like muffins, Kuro-chirp?”

“ _Kurogane –_ and no.” Kurogane found himself saddled with some fruit as well as the muffins and milk, a loaf of bread, some butter – “I don’t like sweet things.”

Fai looked as if someone had stabbed him. “That’s _terrible!”_ he frowned, thinking, and shoved a pack of toothbrushes on the rapidly-growing pile in Kurogane’s arms. “We’ll just have to try a few things on you – I bet I could find something Kuro-sama would like.”

And some shampoo. “I’m not your goddamned pet.”

“Of course not!” A bottle of red wine. “Kuro-wan-wan is a grouchy puppy; he needs training before he can be anyone’s pet.”

“ _What?!”_ Kurogane’s head hurt.

“This way, Kuro-ti~!” Fai pulled him off to the tills, taking the shopping off of him to put on the conveyor belt – it was only as the stuff left him Kurogane realised just how much he’d been lugging around the supermarket.

“ _You_ -”

Fai patted him on the arm. “Doesn’t Kuro-pup have some toilet roll he needs to fetch? We wouldn’t want to disappoint your landlady after all, especially not after you came all this way.”

Kurogane growled, but stomped off to get the toilet roll. Fai was waiting for him when he came back, his own shopping already paid for. Somehow or other, after he’d paid for the rolls, Kurogane ended up carrying Fai’s shopping back to the blond’s car for him (the supermarket was glad to see them both go), Fai taking his arm and dragging him to a nearby café to get something to eat and drink as, as Fai reliably informed him as they took a seat, ‘it would be _terrible_ to drink alcohol and drive, so some hot chocolate and cake would have to do!’ Kurogane ordered black coffee and Fai pouted at him and ordered hot chocolate and some sticky…cake… _thing,_ spearing a chunk on his fork when it arrived and shoving it in Kurogane’s mouth when the other wasn’t paying attention. After chewing and swallowing Kurogane yelled at him again, but his ire was only met with more of Fai’s laughter. The blond was _impossible._

(Somehow, _somehow,_ Fai weaselled Kurogane’s phone number and address out of the other in that meeting, and vanished back off to his car about an hour later with a wave and a smile and an irritatingly distracting sashay. He promptly called later that evening, and again, _somehow,_ Kurogane ended up going out for a proper drink with him, much to his landlady’s voyeuristic delight when the idiot walked him home afterwards and demanded a kiss goodnight.) 

It was only much, _much_ later that Kurogane discovered just why it was Fai had been running in the supermarket that first day anyway, dragging a half-hearted confession out of the idiot weeks later that had something to do with nasty dead octopi, rather bad arranging of the seafood on the shelves, Fai’s oh-so-delicate stomach and Kurogane’s much more appealing ass. Deciding his sanity – already much abused – would be all the better for not inquiring about the details Kurogane left it at that, and went back to happily occupying his mouth with a more-than-willing idiot’s – it was a much more satisfying enterprise, after all.

**Author's Note:**

>  **  
> I really had too much fun with this one. X3 Er…the situation really sprang up when, when trying to think of ideas, I asked SJ what the weirdest thing was she’d ever seen in a Japanese supermarket. When she described the dead octopi on the shelves that _looked_ at you I couldn’t help but imagine sushi-hating Fai’s reaction – and thus came this, with Fai doing a runner away from the stinky seafood to the siren call of Kurogane’s butt.  
> …Kurogane should just accept the fact he’s been domesticated, and live with it.  
> (…The supermarket near my university’s halls had a bunch of weird things in its eighth aisle – it changed with the season/week/day. And it seems to have no organisation to it, either...)**


End file.
